Travels

There is a lot to be said about Sankt Petersburg. I wondered for more than a year about the city, after having visited Russia for the first time in 2009. Arriving in Moscow I went straight forward to the city of Kazan where I met up with a dear friend.

Recently French President and parliament cried out over Berlusconi's decision to grant 3-month permits to all arriving refugees from Tunesia. Getting a Schengen visa for a Russian friend is a small nightmare of red tape. Getting a Russian visa to visit the country yourself is another tightened effort. Yet at the same time the 2010 "local visa-free zone" between Helsinki and Saint-Petersburg has send Finland to be the biggest issuer of Schengen visa in Europe. What a joke, if you ask me.

The magic of Machu Picchu, Peru and the Inca Empire has captured the souls of many travellers around the world. The famous Inca site located at 2.430 metres above sea level, often referred to as "The Lost city of the Incas" and brought to the worlds attention by American Historian Hiram Bingham, hs been declared UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 and voted as one of the 7 New World wonders in 2007

Although we cannot compare modern times to the Inca times, when studying the Inca culture one will be amazed by the high level of sophistication and integration of nature into their lives. In Inca times legs where the only means of transportation. The Inca trial is based on the believe of respecting the different shapes of the terrain and ecological characteristic. The Inca's adapted the contructions to nature in stead of adapting nature to the Inca trial, what we humans are basically always doing. We change the nature to suit our needs. The Inca's had an opposite view.

During my 4+ hour stay at the ancient town of Stari Bar in Montenegro I was one of 5 visitors, the others being an Italian and a German elderly couple. Restoration of the site was halted somewhere in the 1980's which explains all about how the Montenegrin Government handles and cares about it's long history in favour of tourism and new bricks and mortars everywhere.

Last weekend we went for a tourist walk around the old city of Brasov. The walk brings you passed the remnants of the old city walls with some of the fortified towers reconstructed or renovated. From all pictures taken during the walk I have decided to break it up in parts starting with the Black Church, with it's 89m length the largest original Gothic Church between Vienna and Constantinopol.

Unspoiled, vulcanic, mysterious smaragd off a mere 13 square kilometers in a deepblue Caribbean Sea. In my youth it was one of the 6 Dutch Antillean islands (colonies); Nowadays it is one of 3 (Saba, St. Eustatius and Bonaire) special communities from the Netherlands. Now that it has become a Dutch Community, I wonder what we will do with it.